The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law offers a global overview of constitutional law in a comparative context via painstakingly researched articles, and was developed with constitutional lawyers, academics, and students in mind. The online resourceprovides seamless navigation between encyclopedia articles, linking to English versions of the constitutional documents mentioned in articles and hosted on our Oxford Constitutions of the World and US Constitutional Lawproducts, as well as through references from the Oxford Law Citator.

Developed in partnership with the team of editors at the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law, the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Lawhas launched with 70 articles from more than 60 different authors, providing analytical coverage of constitutional law topics in a comparative context. This will grow to include over 500 articles once fully established, linked by an intuitive subject and keyword search functionality.

The articles define and cover the underpinnings of state formation and constitutional law, as well as analysing and explaining from a global comparative perspective a number of foundational legal concepts, such as:

·Human rights

·Constitutional formation

·Scope of state protections

·The defining structures of governmental makeup

·Types of legal structures and interactions within a constitutional law system; and

·Legal constitutional concepts that make up constitutional law

The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law is available on annual subscription to libraries, organizations, and institutions worldwide. Pricing is based on the size and type of institution and the number of users.

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Criminal cases raise difficult normative and legal questions, and are often a consequence of compelling human drama. In this collection, expert authors place leading cases in criminal law in their historical and legal contexts, highlighting their significance both in the past and for the present.

The cases in this volume range from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Many of them are well known to modern criminal lawyers and students; others are overlooked landmarks that deserve reconsideration. The essays, often based on extensive and original archival research, range over a wide spectrum of criminal law, covering procedure and doctrine, statute and common law, individual offences and general principles. Together, the essays explore common themes, including the scope of criminal law and criminalisation, the role of the jury, and the causes of change in criminal law.

The author investigates the birth of modern diplomacy. Drawing on a wide-ranging body of textual materials dealing with the ambassador from the 13th to the 17th century, he analyses how that figure was developed within a complex constantly renewed field of interaction between law, ethics and politics, where theory and practise are intertwined in an unresolved dialectical interaction. The first part examines how the legal status of the ambassador was shaped during the late Middle Ages and how this process influenced early-modern scholarship on diplomacy. The second part investigates how the emergence of the modern State both reinvigorated and reshaped the scholarly approaches to the different themes linked to the figure of the ambassador. The third part proposes an account of how the professional status of the ambassador developed within the examined body of literature. Through the prism of these approaches, diplomacy appears as a foundational matrix of modern political rationality.

With “L'eterno
ritorno del Droit des gens di Emer de
Vattel (secc. XVIII-XIX)” by Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal
History presents the newest publication in its book series "Global
Perspectives on Legal History".

Global Perspectives on Legal History is a book series edited and
published by the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt am
Main, Germany.

As its
title suggests, the series is designed to advance the scholarly research of
legal historians worldwide who seek to transcend the established boundaries of
national legal scholarship that typically sets the focus on a single, dominant
modus of normativity and law. The series aims to privilege studies dedicated to
reconstructing the historical evolution of normativity from a global
perspective.

It includes
monographs, editions of sources, and collaborative works. All titles in the
series are available both as premium print-on-demand and in the open-access format.

The numerous editions and early translations
produced throughout the eighteenth century enabled the broad dissemination of
Emer de Vattel’s juridical-political work Droit des gens. This book
investigates the global impact of the Droit des gens with regard to the
different political realities, the historical and legal contexts as well as the
attempts, mechanisms and strategies used to put these ideas into practice and
establish new doctrine between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Droit des gens
had an extremely diverse impact, owing to its varied reception in different
political situations, historical and legal contexts, and attempts at practical
and theoretical implementation. The fact that Vattel’s book was a point of
reference for a considerable number of jurists and politicians further
demonstrates its authority in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The question naturally
arises whether the continuous references to the work may be regarded as
«typical citations of style», simply confined to referencing Vattel’s thought,
or whether they are a clear sign of a deeper significance; one springing
directly from the characteristics of the Droit des gens, with its
capacity to organise and regulate the State in its domestic and international
relations.

The dissemination of the Droit
des gens is reconstructed via a broad overview of the dynamics that
actually underpinned the use of the treatise, ranging from its influence on
political power in domestic and foreign affairs to its use as a guidebook for
diplomats and consuls, and even its use as a teaching manual.

Co-existing in Vattel’s
work are several topics—the legislative, the political and the social—which are
developed independently of one another, yet are part of one unified framework.
The book aims to bring together a study of the first publication in 1758 of
Vattel’s Droit des gens, its constant interaction with subsequent
editions, translations and annotated versions carried out by jurists in the 19th
century its critical reception (both positive and negative) in relation to the
more complex legislative contexts.

The publishing history of
the Droit des gens will be accompanied by the methodological
aspect—closely bound to the need to write a global legal history—in which
translation, in the broader sense of the term, plays a key role. Concepts of
fashion and modernity are examined within the context of the practical and
theoretical legal entanglements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
thanks to the voices of distinguished jurists and politicians who made use of the
Droit des gens and who translated and annotated it, thereby encouraging
the assimilation—not always unadulterated—of Vattel’s thinking.

Comprehensive and accessible, this book offers a concise synthesis of the evolution of the law in Western Europe, from ancient Rome to the beginning of the twentieth century. It situates law in the wider framework of Europe’s political, economic, social and cultural developments.